How’s this for finding your bliss? Reliving your favorite childhood pastimes in a more artistic way.
Here’s what Nancy Smith, Founder of Frequent Flyers in Boulder, had to work with as source material:
“I spent my childhood climbing trees, swinging on swings and going around till I got dizzy,” she said.
Smith said aerial dance is a relatively new art form, that got its start in New York in 1967, then moved to the West Coast in the mid-1970s. Smith first saw a performance in Seattle, then brought it to Boulder in 1988. She was attracted to the city’s creativity and openness. “It’s a big, innovative community,” she said.
Now it’s a mainstay, and one of 64 Boulder County arts organizations that shared $2.5 million in 2015 funding from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District – a 0.1 percent sales tax renewed by Denver metro area voters in 2016.
“It’s very hard even now to put (what aerial dance is) into words if someone has no frame of reference,” Smith said, adding that some initially found the concept hard to grasp. “Its roots are from modern dance. When people see it, they understand what we’re doing.”
